I’m off to visit the new babies, if they’re still alive. Here’s some stuff to read*:
Why is the FBI taking this guy’s stuff?
Tremble, CT politicians. Some of you may soon need honest jobs. I have said, albeit reluctantly, that state and local elections aren’t always completely pointless.
Here’s a plausible explanation for what Darren Aronofsky was really up to with that weird movie about Noah.
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* If Claire can clear her tabs this way, the practice is officially sanctioned. 🙂
They say that Louis XIV had the inscription Ultima Ratio Regum cast into all the cannon of the French Army. It means “The Ultimate Argument of Kings,” and that always struck me as one of the most honest and up-front things any ruler or would-be ruler ever said. “We can dress it up prettier than this, but when it comes down to the unvarnished truth this is what it’s about: You’ll do as I say or I’ll send my goons to kill you.”
I thought about that for a long time. If there’s an ultimate argument, it seems only logical that there must be an ultimate answer. For years I thought the ultimate answer must be the bullets in my rifle, but it never seemed quite right. I’ve got bullets – he’s got frigging Cannon Balls. I mean, if there were three hundred million rifles throwing bullets at him, then maybe. But we all know that’s not going to happen. So if there’s an ultimate answer to his ultimate argument, it sure as hell ain’t bullets.
It finally came to me – and that’s when I abandoned the city and most of my stuff, and gave all that was behind me a good stiff Randian Shrug.
The ultimate answer to kings is not a bullet, but a belly laugh.
Little Bear 2009-2018
Laddie the Amazing Torso Boy 2011-2020
"Freedom Outlaw. It’s not what you do; it’s how you do it. It’s an attitude — from which actions always follow. It’s a do-it-yourself occupation. And a lifetime vocation."
- Claire Wolfe, Backwoods Home Companion, 6-07-10
I owe my success to having listened respectfully to the very best advice, and then going away and doing the exact opposite.
- G. K. Chesterton
"If every Jewish and anti-Nazi family in Germany had owned a Mauser rifle and twenty rounds of ammunition and the will to use it, Adolf Hitler would be a little-known footnote to the history of the Weimar Republic."
- Aaron Zelman
"Authority should derive from the consent of the governed, not from the threat of force."
- Barbie
"Never underestimate the ability of shit to find a fan."
- F. Paul Wilson
"You can't make an omelet without breaking eggs." The sophistry of villains - Bah!
- Robert A. Heinlein, Double Star
“Truth is, I’m not specifically interested in an armed society. What I want is a free society.”
- George Potter
I never saw a wild thing sorry for itself
A small bird will drop frozen dead from a bough without ever having felt sorry for itself.
- D. H. Lawrence
Aristippus passed Diogenes as he was washing lentils.
He said, “If you could but learn to flatter the king, you would not have to live on lentils.”
Diogenes said, “And if you could learn to live on lentils, you would not have to flatter the king.”
Sandy Hook was a Gun Free Zone. So was the Westroads Mall. And the Aurora Theater. And Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. Should I go on? They were all Gun Free Zones.Â
– Reality
“Political tags — such as royalist, communist, democrat, populist, fascist, liberal, conservative, and so forth — are never basic criteria. The human race divides politically into those who want people to be controlled and those who have no such desire. The former are idealists acting from highest motives for the greatest good of the greatest number. The latter are surly curmudgeons, suspicious and lacking in altruism. But they are more comfortable neighbors than the other sort.”
- Robert A. Heinlein
"Civilization is the process of setting man free from men."
- Ayn Rand
If ever a man should ask you
For your business or your name
Tell him to go and fuck himself
Tell his friends to do the same.
For a man who'd trade his liberty
For a safe and dreamless sleep
Doesn't deserve the both of them
And neither shall he keep.
- Frank Turner
Don't be afraid to try something big, just because you're an amateur. The Ark was built by amateurs. The Titanic was built by professionals.
- Anon
"Nothing scares a police officer more than the threat of being treated the way that they treat people every day."
- Anon
"Be polite, be professional, but have a plan to kill everybody you meet."
- Gen. James Mattis
"Lust for power is the most flagrant of all the passions."
- Tacitus
"The man who knows what freedom means will find a way to be free."
- F.A. "Baldy" Harper
"The greatest discovery of any generation is that a human being can alter his life by altering his attitude."
- William James
We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms -- to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way.
- Viktor Frankl
The free man will ask neither what his country can do for him nor what he can do for his country.
- Milton Friedman
“We must be free not because we claim freedom, but because we practice it.”
- William Faulkner
There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow man; true nobility is being superior to your former self.
- Ernest Hemingway
"Everything the State says is a lie, and everything it has it has stolen."
- Friedrich Nietzsche
John Moses Browning - The most badass Mormon who ever lived.
"The nine most terrifying words in the English language are 'I'm from the government, and I'm here to help.'"
- Ronald Reagan
The most dangerous creation of any society is the man who has nothing to lose.
- James A. Baldwin
"It is better to be a warrior in a garden than to be a gardener in a war."
- Anon
“I tried to live in such a way that, when dying, I would rather feel happy than scared.”
– Witold Pilecki
Few men desire liberty; most men wish only for a just master.
- Sallust
"Place your clothes and weapons where you can find them in the dark."
- Lazarus Long
Read, every day, something no one else is reading.
Think, every day, something no one else is thinking.
Do, every day, something no one else would be silly enough to do.
It is bad for the mind to continually be part of unanimity.
– Â Christopher Morley
“I have found that, to make a contented slave, it is necessary to make a thoughtless one. It is necessary to darken his moral and mental vision, and, as far as possible, to annihilate the power of reason. He must be able to detect no inconsistencies in slavery; he must be made to feel that slavery is right; and he can be brought to that only when he ceases to be a man.”
-Frederick Douglass
ESSE QUAM VIDERI –
To be, rather than to seem
– Marcus Tullius Cicero
“A Winchester rifle should have a place of honor in every black home, and it should be used for that protection which the law refuses to give.”
– Ida B. Wells
Do what thy manhood bid thee do; from none but self expect applause.
He noblest lives and noblest dies, who makes and keeps his self made laws
– Sir Richard Burton
Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.
– Winston Churchill
“Happiness is a journey, not a destination. Dance as though no one is watching you. Love as though you have never been hurt before. Sing as though no one can hear you. Live as though heaven is on earth.”
― Father Alfred d’Souza
A modern, Western Christian (a sociological set of subsets notorious for failing to get along with each other) take on a Hollyweird script assuming it has something to do with an explanation of a “secret” Jewish take on serially-interpreted millenia-old myths of lifted from a bunch of other primitive cultures by a group of self-isolated hunter-gatherers. (Parse that, suckers.)
“Plausible.”
Right! Well, it’s plausible if you don’t know anything about Gnosticism. Or Kaballah. Which I don’t.
From everything I’ve heard of it, Noah makes no sense at all as a Bible story.
The bible makes no sense at all.
Huh! Comments about what I expected so far.
But as someone who did a “minor” in college in ancient near-eastern religions, I can tell you the guy’s right. I suspect readers of this blog were not his intended audience, however, as I suspect many to most aren’t really interested in whether something conforms to the true doctrine of the (small c) catholic church.
I haven’t seen the movie, but if his descriptions of the movie are correct, then he is absolutely correct.
Here are my reasons:
1. The snake skin. If, indeed, the movie has a snake skin as a religious talisman being wielded by Hebrews, then it is Kabbalah/Gnostic symbolism, not traditional Judeo-Christian. Gnostic tradition has one of the true, luminescent, amaterial gods named Sophia attempting to create a son for herself, and finding him to be an abomination, hid him in a cloud that he could not see out of. Her son became Yahweh, the God of the Old Testament, and the God that Christians everywhere pray to, and according to Gnostic tradition, he is arrogant, ugly, cock-sure, jealous, and vengeful. Because of Yahweh’s isolation inside the cloud, he could not see out to realize that he is a lesser God among a panoply of greater beings, and therefore spent most of his existence laboring under the belief that he was the only God, the creator of all that was and will ever be. While the other, greater, more luminescent Gods snickered behind his oblivious back, Yahweh created all of the material world that we know today – the heavens and the Earth, and the animals, just like in the creation myth laid out in Genesis. The Old Testament is told from the perspective of Yahweh’s creation, by the creatures He created. Thus, the jealous, angry God of the Old Testament. This explains the commandments to hold “no other Gods before Him” and so forth, because even though he had no way of knowing that there were other Gods, he probably felt it in some way. Long item short, because the Gnostics see Yahweh as the enemy, anyone that stands against Yahweh is either seen as the good guy, or at least the enemy of my enemy. The snake in the garden of Eden is therefore generally believed by Gnostics to be either Sophia, Yahweh’s mom and the true, enlightened luminescent God, or Satan, who in the Gnostic tradition was chaotic neutral at worst, and chaotic good in some interpretations. The snake was worshipped because the eating of the fruit of knowledge was Creation’s first rebellion against the evil, jealous Yahweh.
2. The Lava Golems. Pretty much for the reasons he explained in his essay, so I won’t go into it.
Really quickly, gnostic traditions see Jesus not as the Son of Yahweh, but the Ying to Sophia’s Yang – the luminescent Gods in Gnostic tradition generally had partners. Jesus came to Earth not to fulfill Yahweh’s will, but Sophia’s. Hence, the total change of the covenant from one of total control, laws, and punishment, to one of love and redemption.
As I recall, the Gnostics saw Jesus’s revelations as being as revealing to Yahweh as they were to mankind, and as a result, Yahweh has either moved up through the panoply of Gods and stopped being such a dick (having become more enlightened), or has been removed from power over the material realms altogether.
The one quibble that I have with the essay is that the author seemed to separate Gnosticism and Christianity as if they are two different things. The Gnostics were Christians, in that they believed Christ was divine and so forth. It is an odd sort of Christianity because it is not monotheistic (and really, given the trinity, is Christianity really monotheistic, anyway?), but it is Christianity, nonetheless, because they recognize Christ as true divinity and worship him as such. As Christianity is to Judaism, Gnosticism is to the Kaballah.